Ranking methods for NZ blogs

I had a go at ranking New Zealand blogs at the end of February (see Rating NZ blogs). A month later I think I will try again. But first – let’s check out the ranking method I am using.

This is similar to that used in the Atheist Blog Ranking which ranks each available statistics and then aggregates these ranks to produce an over all rank. Hopefully the procedure evens out the quirks inevitable in ranking using individual statistical measures.

The procedure is different to that used by Tumeke and Halfdone. So there is no surprise that most blogs will rank differently in each survey.

One problem with my procedure is that different blog rating statistics are inevitably correlated to some extent. After all, they all attempt to provide a measure of blog “popularity.”  However, it turns out that some are more highly correlated than others and these will introduce a “double dipping” influence on the final ranking.

I have now had a look at the data for 80 NZ blogs (mid March 09) and found that Alexa Rank and Alexa Reach effectively produce the same result. Almost 90% of the variation in one is explained by the other. Similarly 94% of the variation in Technorati Authority is explained by Technorati Rank. Also Technorati Blog Reactions (Links) is quite strongly correlated with Technorati Authority (68% of the variation explained).

These correlations are depicted in the figures. You can download the complete correlation analysis if interested (rank-correlations.pdf).

Using these analyses I have settled on the following list of statistical indicators:

Alexa Rank

Aexa New Zealand Rank

Technorati Rank

Google Page Rank

Alexa Links

Google links from blogs

Google links from the web

Yahoo Links

All the Web Links

Google Reader subscriptions

These 10 ranking procedures also enable me to rank blogs for their effectiveness for different categories – rank statistics, links and RSS feed subscriptions. Useful if one wishes to decide the most effective way of improving overall blog ranking.

I’ll post my blog rankings for March seperately.

See also: maxzoneblogoblivionmetricidal at The Inquiring Mind

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